Thursday, December 31, 2015

The secret of Nabokov's sexual style

Lolita was a taboo-breaker, but Nabokov always denied it was pornographic. David Lodge on how poetry and humour come together in his writing about sex

David LodgeSaturday 7 June 2014 08.30 BST

W

riting well about sexual intercourse is not easy, and it has got more, not less, difficult as virtually all legal restraint on the explicit description of sexual acts in literature ceased in most western democracies from the 1960s onwards. Censorship in the past was often oppressive and silly, but it also presented a stimulating challenge to writers, to which they responded by finding subtle ways to convey their meaning indirectly, or more courageously by gradually testing and extending the limits of socially acceptable explicitness. There are a limited number of possible sexual acts. Now that the novelist is expected to describe them, how does s(he) achieve originality? How to avoid revealing, or appearing to reveal, his/her own sexual predilections and fantasies?

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister obituary

The Motörhead frontman’s reputation as one of rock’s most infamous hell-raisers belied his keen intelligence and interest in social and political issues

Joel McIverTuesday 29 December

Few musicians have walked the rebel’s walk with as much conviction as the Motörhead frontman Lemmy, who has died aged 70 after a short battle with cancer. Despite his high-profile image as a hell-raiser, Lemmy’s influence as a musician and songwriter should not be underestimated.

His bass guitar style was unique, combining a heavily distorted tone with chords for a sound that more resembled rhythm guitar. The amphetamine-fuelled tempo of Motörhead’s songs in the 1970s made the band – in any of its many lineups – stand out from the more leisurely heavy-metal sound of the day, inspiring younger admirers such as Metallica. Despite the rawness of his music, Lemmy’s melodies were indebted to classic 1950s rock’n’rollers such as Little Richard, giving Motörhead a recognisable and popular sound.

Lemmy: ‘Apparently I am still indestructible’

The Motörhead frontman has changed his lifestyle – he has switched from whiskey to vodka – in the battle for health. As the band release their 22nd studio album, Bad Magic, he explains how 50 years of hard rocking have taken their toll

Lemmy is as much a collection of myths and legends as a man. In the popular imagination, he’s made up of equal parts Jack Daniel’s, amphetamine sulphate, Nazi memorabilia and extreme-velocity noise. The myths and legends cloak him as surely as the black shirt, the black jeans, the custom-made boots, the cowboy hat with its “Death or Glory” insignia and the Iron Cross around his neck.

Lemmy: 10 of the best

First things first: no one is claiming this is one of the 10 best songs ever recorded by Lemmy. The only thing that’s certain about this pick is that each song could be replaced by a dozen others. So why’s It’s Alright here? Because Lemmy wasn’t just about Motörhead. Or even just Motörhead and Hawkwind. Lemmy was a product of the the 1950s and the 60s, of rock’n’roll and the British beat boom. Starting a top 10 with the release of the first Motörhead album just wouldn’t be truthful, because he’d been making music for 15 years or so before then. Lemmy’s first recordings were made with the Rockin’ Vickers (originally billed as Rev Black and the Rockin’ Vickers), who were Blackpool’s premier mid-60s exponents of playing R&B while dressed as vicars. (It was, admittedly, a small field.) No one would know who they were now if it not for the fact that Lemmy, then still called Ian Willis, was their lead guitarist, largely because their slim recorded legacy isn’t really up to that much. The standout is this version of a Pete Townshend song – which either prefigured or was adapted from the Who’s The Kids Are Alright – where we get the first glimpses of Lemmy’s unhinged approach to making his instrument a conduit of noise: the scrunches of guitar at the beginning are reminiscent of the Creation, while Lemmy’s solo sounds as if 999 monkeys had been handed guitars and locked in a room until one of them came up with something approaching free jazz.

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Band pays tribute to ‘noble friend’ Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, who died after learning of cancer diagnosis on Boxing Day

Adam BreretonTuesday 29 December

The band announced on their Facebook page that Lemmy learned of the disease on 26 December, and was at home when he died.

Lemmy, born Ian Fraser Kilmister, formed Motörhead in 1975 and was its only constant member, as singer and bassist. The band released 23 studio albums and are best known for their 1980 single Ace of Spades.

About 10,588 unaccompanied children crossed the US-Mexico border in October and November, more than double who crossed during the same period last year

Associated Press and staffSaturday 26 December 2015 17.58 GMT

The seven children had just crossed the river, shoes still caked with mud, when US border patrol agents stopped them.

The youngest was six, Jon Smith Figueroa Acosta, he said, and he’d made the 2,000-mile journey from Honduras. He did not know to what city or state he was headed, but he had a phone number for his father in the United States.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Will Ferrell:

‘Ignorance is a key part of comedy’

Will Ferrell knows exactly how to make us laugh. He’s back with Mark Wahlberg for his latest film, Daddy’s Home, and will soon return as Mugatu in Zoolander 2. Tim Adams meets him to see what’s behind the most expressive jowls in America

Tim Adams
Sunday 20 December 2015 11.30 GMT

Will Ferrell: ‘He looks like he could have walked out of a pensions plan ad.’ Photograph: Pål Hansen for the Observer

Half an hour before I interviewed Will Ferrell I made the mistake of watching a clip of him interviewing himself. In one of Ferrell’s manySaturday Night Live (SNL) incarnations he did a celebrated spoof of the long-running American arts show Inside the Actors Studio, in which James Lipton presents cerebral interrogations of Hollywood stars. Ferrell donned a bald wig and beard, sat with a pile of Lipton’s preferred blue notecards and went through a parody of the questions he might have asked: “What’s your favourite curse word?” he asked of himself. “If heaven exists what would you like to hear God say when you arrive?” And, of acting in general, and comedy in particular: “Is it craft – or is it crap?”

Sunday, December 27, 2015

A brief survey of the short story part three:

Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant's immaculately plotless tales are much loved by other writers. We readers shouldn't let them hog her

No living author seems to me less deserving of the term "writer's writer" and its implication of remote obscurity than Mavis Gallant. In Michael Ondaatje's words, "among writers she is a shared and loved and daunting secret", and it seems a telling detail that while she remains too little known, those who read her tend to move, as I did, from ignorance to devotion with uncommon haste.

An English Canadian born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant has lived in Paris since 1950. Perhaps as a combination of an unsettled childhood - from the age of four onwards she attended 17 boarding schools - her early, short-lived marriage, and her relocation at the age of 27 to Paris (a city in which she knew no one) with the sole intention of writing fiction, the themes that have come to define her work are those of expatriation, dislocation and impermanence.

Gallant has written two novels and more than 100 stories, most of which were first published in the New Yorker. These have been collected in eight books, but Bloomsbury's doorstopping Selected Stories, its contents chosen by the author herself, is the best single-volume starting point.

Set between the 1930s and the present day, and ranging in location from Madrid, the Côte d'Azur, Berlin, Montreal, Florida, Moscow and, of course, Paris, Gallant's stories employ a myriad of voices, styles and techniques to explore a similarly diverse range of subjects. She has also written interlinked cycles, such as the strongly autobiographical Linnet Muir sequence from the mid-1970s and the comical Henri Grippes stories. Yet, as noted above, it is the marginalised life of the expatriate that is most often returned to.

The feeling of displacement so crucial to much of Gallant's work is nothing as parochial or crude as merely pointing out the differences between cultures (although her characters themselves might sometimes do just that, the intention is generally to show how such attitudes are born of misconceptions). Rather, the otherness of the foreigner abroad mirrors a more profound separation that lies between us all, no matter how much in love or intimate we might think ourselves to be with others. Indeed, she often seems to suggest that acceptance of this unpleasant fact is key to establishing one's personal freedom. The superb 1971 story "In the Tunnel" offers a particularly unflinching expression of this view.

For this reason there is often a coldness at the heart of her stories, but it would be quite wrong to see this as existing in place of empathy. Gallant's tone can alter in a moment, twisting between the satirical, the cruel and the compassionate with no warning or clue offered to inattentive readers. Critics have also said she is unfair towards her male characters, but speaking as a representative of that sex I'd say she seems to be pretty spot on with them, in all their pusillanimous or predatory detail.

"Useless chaos is what fiction is about," Gallant has said, and even in those stories where significant events occur they remain rooted entirely in character and deliberately careless in plotting, always favouring interiority and reaction above action. Throughout her work incidents receive and are starved of attention in a way that entirely ignores the precedents typically thought of as being essentials of dramatic tension.

And yet, paradoxically, they remain compulsively readable and deeply memorable. In this regard her writing represents a peerless rebuttal to all talk of the importance of structure and the rules of writing, glorying instead only in the marriage of the inventiveness of the mind and a blank page's potential.

If this sounds somehow too haphazard to be effective, or her manner too detached to provoke profound feeling, one need only read a story such as "The Other Paris" (1953) or the masterful The Moslem Wife (1976) - or any one of many more - to realise their emotional power, even if oftentimes this impact is only truly experienced some time after their reading. Gallant acknowledges this in her preface to the Selected Stories, writing:

"Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."

They can, and of course they do, but it's difficult to follow this wise advice when the inimitable works it refers to are of such temptingly high quality.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

A brief survey of the short story part 2:

HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was a master of fantastic horror tales, but the hate which drove his work was all too real.

Chris PowerWednesday 7 November 200708.00 GMT

It seems at once germane and perverse, when still within a grave's length of Halloween, to dedicate the next post in my survey of the short story to a man who traded in horror, yet whose creations won't ever be costumes clothing the world's trick-or-treaters. That said, if anyone rang my bell dressed as the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath - writhing masses of ropy black tentacles with multiple puckered mouths - or any other spawn of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's furiously dark imagination, I wouldn't be dilatory in dishing out the sweets.

Lovecraft's fictional oeuvre - more than 50 stories written between 1905 and his death in 1937 - is unremittingly bleak. Heavily influenced by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft went several rungs lower than his forebears by eradicating any shred of optimism from his tales of what he called "cosmic horror".

Lovecraft's world, now known as the "Cthulhu Mythos" has gone on to be a common source for Jorge Luis Borges and a host of other, lesser authors. This is a world where humanity exists in the shadow of ancient, monstrous, slumbering extraterrestrial beings who are occasionally woken and to whom we are as insignificant as microbes in a petri dish.

From a purely stylistic perspective, the weight of dread Lovecraft can summon is extraordinary, although when excerpted certain passages can seem preposterously overblown. In their proper context, however, his hallucinatory moments erupt to shocking effect from prose otherwise characterised by its dry, scholarly tone: in this manner, time and again, reason is invoked only to be torn to shreds and tossed into a midden, which is pretty much what Lovecraft thought the world amounted to.

This monomaniacal vision results in a great deal of repetition throughout the stories, both thematically and at the level of the sentence. Discovered journals reoccur; moons are invariably "gibbous" and horrors "eldritch", "unnameable" or "unspeakable", while every character is either headed for a padded cell, disappearing into a gaping maw or recording their final thoughts as murderous cultists descend on them.

But rather than being tedious, these repetitions become instead something insidiously ritualised. The real horror, one that multiplies if several stories are read in succession, is generated by their obsessive reaffirmation of life's mindless cycle. But rejecting Lovecraft's toweringly bleak outlook doesn't preclude appreciation of these compellingly weird fictions.

The most successful of Lovecraft's stories, such as The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) or The Call of Cthulhu (1926), are elaborate in construction and measured in their revelations, generating atmospheres of dread that are difficult to shake off. Add to this their interconnectedness, from the fictional New England settings of Arkham and Miskatonic University (Alma Mater to numerous doomed students and professors) to the rites, tentacled beasts and visions of alien, non-Euclidian cities that recur. What emerges is a unique blending of place and theme similar to Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Paris of Balzac's Comédie Humaine.

In the best traditions of science fiction, Lovecraft was also quick to incorporate contemporary discoveries into his work. At the Mountains of Madness (1931) makes use of continental drift theory, still controversial at the time, while the discovery of Pluto in 1930 was immediately accorded an ominous relevance in The Whisperer in Darkness. Similarly, Planck's quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity were rapidly co-opted into his work and squared with his beliefs, just as youthful readings of Darwin had proven to him the non-existence of the human soul.

There is another aspect to this strange body of work, however, much less discussed than its horror. Following an unhappy period in the mid-1920s living amid New York's immigrant community, Lovecraft's previously amorphous racism became focused and rabid. Michel Houellebecq believes this shift is what impelled the "mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences" that streak his greatest works, beginning with The Call of Cthulhu. In these stories the sects that worship his monstrous creations are invariably non-whites or uneducated, rural whites, and Lovecraft asserts - in terms uncomfortably close to contemporary fascist rhetoric - that through their actions these "lower breeds" are hastening humanity's end.

It's a repugnant viewpoint, and presents a difficulty with which anyone who can be said to "enjoy" Lovecraft's work must tussle. Because the forms lurking in his work, albeit draped in phantasmagorical disguise, aren't really beings from beyond, but manifestations of a very human hatred.

Friday, December 25, 2015

A brief survey of the short story part one:

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov's subtle portrayals of complex, morally ambiguous characters set an example writers are following to this day.

"He's the uncontestable father of the modern short story"Chris PowerThe Guardian, 30 October 2007

This is the first in a regular series of blogs that propose to offer a (very) partial survey of the short story, each post dealing with a single author who did or is doing something special with the form. In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that when I say "partial" I mean both "incomplete" and "biased", and I hope I'll get to hear dissenting opinions from you folks.

My determination to avoid a straightforward recitation of recognised greats notwithstanding, first up is Anton Chekhov. I couldn't justify starting with anyone else because for me he's the uncontestable father of the modern short story, both by dint of bridging 19th-century realism and 20th-century experimentation and because his stories are some of the best that have ever been written. Plus, spit in a bookshop and chances are you'll hit something marked by his influence. Unless you're in the coffee bar.

Despite the panegyric, it's fair to say that Chekhov started as a hack, albeit a talented one, knocking out short comic stories and doggerel for newspapers at a furious rate - around 500 pieces in eight years - mostly under the pseudonym Antosha Chekonte. Some of these appeared in his first collection, Motley Tales (1886), which he wanted to give the immeasurably better title Buy This Book or I'll Smash Your Face In. By the late 1880s his craftmanship and ambition had evolved significantly, with his long story The Steppe (1888) becoming the first of his works to be published in one of Russia's serious literary journals.

While The Steppe still bears strong traces of Gogol and Tolstoy's influence, by the time of its writing most of the key elements of what's meant by the term "Chekhovian" were in place, not least his revolutionary approach to the details with which his stories are littered. Certain readers at the time were discomfited by these welters of seemingly arbitrary information that led nowhere. That they didn't lead nowhere, that in fact these stories changed the way in which a story asked to be read, is one of Chekhov's greatest achievements. The consternation was at least partly due to the sheer accessibility of his writing: there is perhaps no other body of work in which the border between reading an opening line and becoming immersed is so slight. But this accessibility doesn't denote uncomplicated intentions.

This is supported by Chekhov's attitude towards character, especially following his 1890 journey to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island where the savage cruelty he witnessed made a deep impression. After this doers of good and evil continue to appear in his stories, but never as saints or monsters. Instead, Chekhov's characters and stories, particularly throughout the 1890s and up to his death from consumption in 1904, can be defined by their very lack of definition, their unwillingness to simplify the complexities of personality.

With the notable exception of Ward No 6, a ferociously pessimistic satire wherein a mental ward comes to stand for the Russian state and in which he adopts the style of a Dostoyevskyian intrusive narrator, Chekhov contrives to be an utterly selfless author: what's noticed is what his characters would notice, and in the manner they'd notice it. His 1890 story Gusev, in which the third-person narration takes on aspects of the eponymous soldier's way of viewing the world, is a particularly good example of this trait.

It's largely for this reason that Chekhov is a supremely unquotable writer (at least in the space afforded here): his stories are discrete totalities, entirely defined by subject and context. Their styles conform to character and event, rather than character and event conforming to a single style.

Other innovations include moments of epiphany (an evolution from Maupassant, although it's Joyce who gave the technique a name and thus is often proclaimed as its pioneer), his shifting deployments of irony, and experiments with stream of consciousness (such as in the startling conclusion of Ward No 6). Finally, and most impressively of all, by rejecting Tolstoy's idea of the author as a guide directing his readers towards salvation Chekhov became the author laureate of not knowing, which in his case means the absolute opposite of not caring.

His stories are so often ambiguous because they don't trap a portion of life and analyze it to make a point. Instead they observe and recount, entirely unafraid of open-endedness, and in the process provide little in the way of answers, but a vast store of wisdom.